Guiding devices have long been used for spooling and unspooling elongated items. One use for these devices is for the installation of telephone, power, and fiber optic cables. There may be upwards of 25 reels of cable brought to a site on a truck, and each of these reels conventionally feeds a single guiding device through which cables of different diameters and fragilities must pass together. Because of this, there is significant opportunity for entanglement and damage to fragile cables such as fiber optic cables. In addition, often each cable is laid by a different worker, such that each worker's efforts can be disruptive to the efforts of the other workers when all simultaneously share a single guiding device.
One reason that a single guiding device is conventionally used is that such prior art devices are difficult to move into position and difficult to mount into optimal positions and dispositions with respect to the spools of cable. Also, such devices are heavy and bulky, so that repositioning in the field is often not practical.
Some prior art devices include guide rollers that are not designed to overcome the problem of guiding and protecting delicate elongated items, such as fiber optic cables. Prior art devices do not include any mount scheme that allows the guiding devices to be flexibly employed in a plurality of different positions with respect to the spools and the work being done with the cables. The bulk, heft, and relatively inflexible mounting schemes of prior art devices are not convenient to a strategy of utilizing a separate and appropriately sized guiding device for each individual cable being used by various workers.
Another difficulty with prior art devices is that such devices often lack a means by which a cable can be placed within their enclosure and against their guiding surfaces without resort to threading a free end of the cable through the guiding devices. For example, Scheidt U.S. Pat. No. 2,783,025 discloses a permanently mounted cable guiding apparatus. Such permanently fixed devices do not work well when their application cannot be determined in advance or when that application is subject to change as is common when stringing or laying cable. Further, the device disclosed in the Scheidt patent does not include a means by which cable can be installed in the device without resort to threading one of the cable ends through the device.
Another prior art device can be found in Wyatt U.S. Pat. No. 3,070,355 which discloses an enclosed guide frame having a single leg that pivots open. There are at least two problems with the frame design shown in the Wyatt patent. First, the pivoting leg is secured with a heavy screw that requires a wrench to open. Second, only a single leg of the frame opens to form a relatively narrow entrance into the enclosed frame, such that it can be relatively difficult to insert a cable into the frame. Further, the Wyatt patent fails to disclose a mounting scheme for a guide frame that is adapted to place the guide frame in any of a plurality of positions with respect to the mount.
For the foregoing reasons there is a need for a guiding apparatus that provides for quick and easy access to its guiding enclosure and a maximal enclosure opening width, and that is constructed specifically for manufacturing economy, portable operation and maximum flexibility.